ROFL: Reading On the Floor Laughing Umberto Eco – Travels in Hyperreality I recently came across an essay by Umberto Eco entitled Travels in Hyperreality from 1975. It is the fruit of Eco’s visit to America, a hyperreal land, as he claims, the hyperreality of which he sets out to grasp. Eco visits Disneyland—of… Keep Reading
This month on the Ark Audio Book Club we discussed the Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s disturbing 1983 novel of repression desire and violence, The Piano Teacher. The novel tells the story of Erika Kohut, a talented one-time concert pianist in Vienna who, due to a couple of key performance failures (although arguably the cause… Keep Reading
Content warning: this piece contains discussion of racial and sexual violence. Also, if you’re so inclined, Content warning: content warning. Cycling home one evening, I saw the poster featuring the original title of Madame Nielsen and Sort/Hvid’s (Christian Lollike) recent collaboration, the play White Nigger/ Black Madonna (hereafter to be referred to by its current… Keep Reading
Writing an introduction to accelerationism in 2018 feels a bit odd. In that, were it as pervasive a cultural virus as many of its adherents espoused, it should no longer require an introduction. This seems like some kind of evidence that suggests there’s something lack in the idea itself, at least as it relates to… Keep Reading
Torpor is the final part of Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick trilogy, a series which chronicles the final years of her (character’s) marriage to the cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer and her obsession with Dick and her attempts to become a filmmaker, and maybe in the process become a little bit more like her hero, Simone Wiel. Set… Keep Reading
“As long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers.”— Inherent Vice I am a great admirer of the work of the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. So, a few years back, when he released a film based on the novel, Inherent… Keep Reading
Literary fiction was a term used by the upper classes to suggest books which paired pointless sex with ruminations on the nature of mortgages were of greater merit than books which paired pointless sex with guns and violence. The CIA funded literary fiction because people at the CIA believed that American literature was excellent propaganda… Keep Reading
In the name of feminism, ‘Nature’ shall no longer be a refuge of injustice, or a basis for any political justification whatsoever! If nature is unjust, change nature! — Laboria Cuboniks Xenofeminism draws on a multiplicity of influences and has implications for just as many areas in philosophy, the pharmaceutical industry, music, biology, mathematics,… Keep Reading
This month on the Ark Review we are teaming up with kbh Læser to explore the form of the manifesto! We have a whole bunch of stuff planned. Franel Korbanski will (likely) be meditating on the impossibility and importance of translation by looking at the Translatological Manifesto by the renowned Polish poet and translator, Stanisław… Keep Reading
This month there is a bonus episode of the Ark Audio Book Club podcast on David Foster Wallace’s epic of tennis, drug addiction and TV. In preparation for that, the panel has written four short reviews of this very long book, ranging from the very favourable to the sycophantically fawning. Franek (Press play before you… Keep Reading